Dawn is the first book in Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, recently reissued as the infinitely-less-cool-sounding “Lilith’s Brood” series. It tells the story of Lillith, a woman who wakes up after a nuclear winter on Earth in an sealed room. She’s held there for almost two years, under constant interrogation from a maddeningly patient, incorporate voice. One day she discovers a shadowy figure in her cell — her captor. He tells her that the people holding her hostage aren’t Soviets, the CIA, or any other terrestrial entity. They’re aliens. He tells her that he’s come to free her, but only when she’s able to look at him without terror. He raises the lights: tentacles for a face.

Thus begins Lillith’s real ordeal, the struggle to assimilate with a race of impossibly alien aliens on a ship orbiting her own destroyed planet. The aliens, called Oankali, offer her a deal: they’ve restored the Earth to health, and they intend to send the surviving humans they’ve gathered back down to begin the race anew. In exchange, they demand access to the genepool. The Oankali are genetic traders, creatures who’ve evolved specialized organs to manipulate their own genes, but who (paradoxically) must interbreed with other species in order to assure the survival of their kind. The aliens, Lillith discovers, want to have sex with her.

“Your people will change. Your young will be more like us and ours more like you….We’re as committed to the trade as your body is to breathing. We were overdue for it when we found you. Now it will be done, to the rebirth of your people and mine.”

One of the most compelling things about Dawn is the way that it expresses the fundamental dread that alienness inspires in its human protagonists. The Oankali are ugly — covered in thousands of wormlike tentacles that serve as sensory organs — but it’s not their ugliness that Lillith and the other humans find repulsive. It’s their shocking difference. Upon first meeting an Oankali, humans panic, lose consciousness, and self-mutilate. They literally cannot bring themselves to move any closer to the aliens, or even look directly at them. The first time Lillith encounters her captor, he forces his presence on her for five days before, exhausted and psychically broken, she is finally able to touch him.

This realistic horror of the other is the crux of the conflict that Lillith and her human counterparts face in Dawn. They are given the opportunity to resurrect the human race, but only if future generations of humans hold Oankali genes. Can the humans cope with the idea of their children being only half-human? Is that a fair trade? Is it even the perpetuation of the human race, if the future includes tentacles for arms and advanced powers of genetic manipulation?

Many critics have read Butler’s tales of racial anxiety as post-colonial allegories about powerlessness and domination in a racist society, which is a totally valid interpretation since a) Butler is one of only a few black female science fiction writers, and b) many of her novels deal explicitly with slavery. Despite the obvious parallels in Dawn — Oankali as plantation owners, forcing nonconsensual interbreeding, denying the humans access to books and writing implements, emphasizing their genetic superiority — I think it’s somewhat reductive to read “humans” as “slaves” in Butler’s work. The value of science fiction is often sold to the mainstream as being primarily allegorical; the aliens are Russians, the astronauts are colonialists, the new planet is the continent of America, intergalactic trade is really just slavery, “how clever, this will fool the censors!” But the power of this kind of tit-for-tat symbolism died with the pulps, and Butler didn’t write space westerns — she wrote highly complex, nuanced, sexually-charged feminist think pieces with no clear resolution and no obvious bad guys. The aliens here aren’t evil, they just have a different evolutionary imperative.

If anything, the Oankali practice a kind of inverse racism that is particularly foreign to humanity: while the narrative of racism in the West stems from an emphasis on racial, biological, and genetic “purity,” the Oankali impose mutations, symbiosis, and cosmic miscegenation. There is nothing isolationist about the alien mentality; the Oankali procreate with humans by literally placing themselves between a man and a woman, interpreting and modifying the biological exchange. They’re in the scrum, not peering down at it from a pedestal of their own design.

Butler speaks, rather, to the instability of identity in the face of genetic manipulation. It’s a weighty exploration of biological determinism; if our genes define us, then who are we? We contain billions of them; how many need to change before we are no longer human? Lillith undergoes subtle biological changes as the result of her cooperation with the Oankali: increased strength, a change in chemical signature that allows her to operate parts of the ship, a greater resistance to cancer. These all contribute to a perception of her as a Judas goat, someone who has betrayed her humanity. And yet her essential identity remains, even when the aliens give her an eidetic memory. Her transformations cut her off from her own kind, and while she grows close to her alien keepers, she can never be quite like them, either. Lillith’s position is deeply liminal: she is human, biologically, though less than before, and soon to parent a generation born of intergalactic parentage.

In suit, Dawn is a meditation on the self, a novel that ponders the porous boundaries between skin and world, human and alien, person and nonperson, natural and technological. What we think of as our personhood is actually an emergent system of genes, microbes, and electrical impulses — and it’s the product of cultural interpretation, an ideological system for enforcing meaning from meat. Identity is not biology. The Oankali know this, and they push Lillith to understand herself as more than the sum of her genes, as a mutable instance that is adaptable to an intergalactic, rather than terrestrial, context.

Supplemental Materials:

Space Canon review of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower